Dan Hurlin

DAN HURLIN, Artistic Director

Dan Hurlin received a 1990 Village Voice OBIE award for his solo adaptation of Nathanael West’s A Cool Million and his suite of puppet pieces Everyday Uses For Sight: Nos. 3 & 7 (2000) earned him a 2001 New York Dance and Performance award (a.k.a. “BESSIE"). His 1992 solo Quintland earned sculptor Donna Dennis a New York Dance and Performance award BESSIE for visual design. In 1998 Dan was nominated for an American Theater Wing Design award for his set design for his music theater piece The Shoulder (music by Dan Moses Schreier). His full-length puppet piece Hiroshima Maiden (2004), with an OBIE award winning score by Robert Een, was awarded a UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionette) citation of Excellence.

Other works include Who's Hungry?/West Hollywood (2008) and Who's Hungry?/Santa Monica (2010)—a suite of puppet pieces based on the oral histories of homeless and food insecure residents of Los Angeles, collected by Dan Froot; Disfarmer which premiered at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2009 and the making of which was chronicled in filmmaker David Soll's documentary, Puppet. Earlier performance works include NO(thing so powerful as)Truth (1995); Constance and Ferdinand (1991); The Jazz Section (1989); and his toy theater piece The Day The Ketchup Turned Blue (1997) from the short story by John C. Russell. Dan has performed with Ping Chong, Janie Geiser, and Jeffrey M. Jones, and directed premieres of works by Erik Ehn, Lisa Kron, Holly Hughes, Dan Froot and John C. Russell among others. Formerly the Artistic Director of Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, New Hampshire, Dan currently teaches performance art, dance and puppetry at Sarah Lawrence College where also serves as the director of the graduate program in theater.

His work has been supported by three Rockefeller Map grants, and grants from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jim Henson Foundation, the Helios Foundation, and many others. In addition to three individual artist fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, Dan has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital and the New York State Foundation for the arts. Twice a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Dan is the recipient of a 2002 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim foundation in choreography, a 2004 Alpert Award in the Arts for theater, was named the 2008 USA artists Prudential fellow in theatre, and the 2013/14 Jesse Howard Junior Rome Prize Fellow in visual art at the American Academy in Rome.